BE NKY, an economic development company that focuses on Boone, Kenton, and Campbell Counties, held a quarterly briefing on regional economic development on Thursday morning. They presented data analysis of the last quarter’s trends and discussed what the region needed to do to stay economically competitive.
“So the question isn’t ‘Are these disruptions and challenges going to happen?’ They are,” said BE NKY’s CEO, Lee Crume. “The question is then ‘What is our community going to do about it?'”
Several presenters spoke on various topics. Kimberly Rossetti, BE NKY’s vice president of economic development, discussed economic growth in the region generally. Christine Russel, the executive director of the NKY Port Authority, also discussed key development projects in the region, such as the SparkHaus, the OneNKY Center and the new Center for Biomedical Excellence at the former IRS site.
David McAleese, BE NKY’s research director, took up most of the time. McAleese analyzed public data as well as information from the regional private sector, identifying positives and negatives related to economic growth, intending to persuade the attendees to think critically about the region’s overall economic health.
“So all that boils down to the need to develop a holistic community strategy that, first and foremost, assesses the existing competitive net landscape for us, and then identifies what are those critical needs? What are those strategic goals for us here in the community?” McAleese said.
McAleese discussed BE NKY’s analysis methodology, which examined demographic and tax data, local studies, such as the Northern Kentucky Area Development District’s Housing Study, among others, as well as interviews and meetings with large employers.
BE NKY’s company meetings yielded several insights as it related to how the region stacks up with other large metro areas throughout the country. According to the analysis, NKY’s advantages include its centralized location, low cost of living and cost of doing business, a large labor pool and established cooperation between the private and public sectors. On the other hand, the region’s disadvantages were high wage competition between workers, a largely unskilled labor pool (in spite of its size), poor transport infrastructure for both normal residents and businesses and a lack of regional identity.
As such, McAleese said, the region’s business community needed to focus on improving the skills of the local workforce, do more to cultivate a distinct identity, address the region’s housing problems, encourage entrepreneurship and continue building out public and private partnerships.
McAleese invited several representatives from various companies to speak on these topics.
Paul Verst, the CEO of Verst Logistics, talked about the challenges of finding well-qualified local candidates when the company lost two of its high-level administrative and executive staff.
“We continue to struggle, especially in the way of attracting and retaining of white collar jobs in particular,” Verst said.
Adrian Hothem, the president and CEO of Camco Chemicals, which is based in Florence and was founded in Fort Thomas, said that it was difficult to attract talent without a distinct regional identity, one that differentiates NKY from Cincinnati and the rest of the tri-state.
“We have to have an identity that fits our region, not city to city or county to county,” Hothem said. “What does that mean as a region, and then how do we have a collective brand that we then can communicate and share and promote?”
Hothem and other speakers argued that regional identity and workforce development were indelibly interconnected, both in terms of attracting people from out of the region and training people already here.
“It’s having that common identity that we can all speak to, embrace and support that drives population growth,” Hothem said, “because right now, we may develop great workforce strategies, but if there’s no one to train or no one to develop, then it’s all for naught.”
At the end of the presentations, Crume encouraged the attendees to think about how they can address these problems and to stay involved before the next briefing in August.
“We can do nothing; we’re gonna be fine,” Crume said, addressing the attendees. “[It’s] not going to affect the rest of my life, but… are your children going to be able to come back and live here? It’s our responsibility to restock the stream.”
Read a full report laying the details of BE NKY’s analysis at the link below: